Spaceships and Simulations

All games are simulations.

All games? Yes. Even baseball? Would you prefer it if I wrote all table top games? But, yes, I can make the claim that all games are simulations. Baseball is simulating a game of baseball.

Too Plato? Baseball is a physics simulation, taking a series of material interactions governed by what we refer to as scientific laws. It takes those interactions and then finds a way to make the real representational in a specific sort of artificial way.

But now I’m just showing off, and it’s annoying. All games take some facet of reality or fiction and reduplicate it in a contained way. It is not simulating what is, not necessarily. It can be a simulation of something fictional, like an action movie.

You can go all Baudrillard and remark at the set of mirrors reflecting each other going on here, but stick to Diogenes: you get it, even if you don’t want to. This is a role playing game blog. There’s a thing, and there’s a copy of that thing, and the pursuit of that copy is a game.